The SSL certificate industry can and should be replaced

Moxie Marlinspike has just the plan to revolutionize SSL certificate security

The SSL certificate authorities like Comodo that have had their security undermined by hackers shouldn't be trusted, and in fact, the way the entire SSL certificate industry of today works can and should be replaced with something better, says Moxie Marlinspike, a security expert who's come up with a plan he says will do that.

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Marlinspike's plan, unveiled last August at the Black Hat Conference, is called "Convergence," and it's gaining some momentum, particularly after the shocking hacker attacks on DigiNotar, GlobalSign, Comodo and other SSL certificate authorities of late that resulted in fake certificates coming into use on the web, including a fake Google certificate, since revoked.

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Comodo is one-quarter to one-fifth of certificates on the Internet and removing support for Comodo in the browser would be hugely disruptive operationally in this current system. But the underlying security for it all is just "an illusion," according to Marlinspike. He pointed out, "We've made a decision to trust Comodo forever, regardless of whether they continue to earn that trust."

Marlinspike continued, "What happened to DigiNotar is the kind of thing that happens every day. It was an accident anyone ever noticed. If the hackers hadn't been stupid, no one would have ever noticed."

Marlinspike points out that Convergence is "totally backward compatible" with the current SSL certificate system and the "user experience is exactly the same as now." It's simply in the Convergence model, the notaries you contact tells you if they believe the certificate is valid or not. Through multiple answers to that question, there's an increase in the validation through consensus. Business can keep getting signed certificates if they want, but the validation for them changes according to what the user trusts.

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